Typically large businesses with a large customer population (for example, the financial services, banking, health care, retail, utilities, telecommunications and insurance industries) have significant difficulty providing one-to-one personalization of the information they provide to customers and prospects. Businesses can communicate with customers through many different mediums such as physical documents (e.g. paper), electronic documents, online (e.g. web-based content), telephone or face-to-face interaction. These points of contact between the customer and the business or products are commonly called touchpoints.
As the number of customers increases and in order to provide economies of scale, the content in the touchpoints must be generalized when using traditional techniques in order for the touchpoint to reach the broadest customer base. Document engineering services provide composition toolsets for delivering print, and more recently web content to large recipient bases. Examples of these deliveries include bank statements, policy documentation, legal documentation and account summaries. The variability in content delivered within a particular document has historically been limited. Fragments of data, such as, account balances, transaction summaries and recipient summaries are varied on a per customer basis; however, dramatically changing significant sections of content based on demographic, transactional or other types of stored customer data has proved to be technically difficult and/or labor intensive.
Businesses are recognizing that customer interactions are made more effective by providing relevant, personalized information to their customers during interactions rather than standard, boiler-plate content. Moreover, to improve businesses' customer relationships, there is a need to better manage these customer touchpoints. One example of software to facilitate management of these customer touchpoints is sold by Prinova Software Inc. of Toronto, Ontario, Canada under the name Messagepoint® further disclosed in U.S. Published Patent Application Number 2008/0046267 and incorporated herein by reference. Messagepoint® offers facilities for targeting content to individual recipients. For example, an investment firm may wish to promote a new fund to customers with investments greater than a defined minimum threshold who have previously invested in similar funds. Messagepoint® achieves this objective by managing content, targeting rules, messaging strategy and coordination with a composition tool responsible for generating the final media channel.
Although Messagepoint® provides businesses with useful functionality, the targeting mechanism becomes inadequate when faced with the high scale, hierarchically structured data sets applied by almost all businesses. The subject application further simplifies management of hierarchically-based variant content by improving navigation thereof.